The sun rained gold, the sea ran blue, the wind in the rigging sang the
very oldest song. I moved about the ship. The covers of the hatches
were raised. I saw with a kind of shock that the openings beneath
were grated. So were other apertures about the ship. I went to one
of the hatches and looked down, but the strong light above showed
little save darkness. I asked a man how much room would they have down
there between floor and roof. “Six feet clear,” he answered. “But the
platforms divide it, you know, so each tier has almost three feet. The
_Janet’s_ roomy compared to most. Roomiest Guineaman I know!”
“How many Africans does she carry?”
“Five hundred.”
I stared at the darkness below the grating. The seaman--it was Jack
Dannet--went on swabbing the deck beside me. I said, “Do you like
bringing slaves from Africa?”
“I’m not paid to like it,” he answered. “At first I didn’t like it, I
remember. But I got used to it. A man gets used to anything.”
I thought, “There’s always a little of him that creeps away.”
Dannet, washing the deck, continued, “I’ve been in ships that I didn’t
like--any more than hell! Free English sailors get banged about in
Guineamen as if they had been born without a rag on them, up the Oil
River! But the _Janet’s_ got a reputation of being a regular old
mother.”
“But the Negroes--how do you feel about them?”
“Oh, them! I don’t feel about them at all. Used to, maybe, just at
first, but it don’t last.”
His continued swabbing put distance between us. The second mate,
Pomeroy, came by. “Looking at our accommodations, Mr. Scott?”
“They’re scant for five hundred,” I said. “They’re shallow for five
hundred or for fifty or for five or for one.”
“Why, there you’re mistaken,” he replied. “The ship has a name for
commodiousness. At Whidah and Calabar and elsewhere you’ll see them
that I do think are scant.”
He was a short, black-haired, bull-necked man with a fishy and prying
eye. I liked Bartram and I liked McNaughton but I did not like Pomeroy.
He was curious about me and I let him be curious. “Jamaica and
Barbadoes are our usual ports. But we’re just from Bristol where we’ve
been refitting, and the captain had a fancy for anchoring by Norfolk.
It’s pleasant that we hit in with your plans, sir! I believe you have
been on a visit to a relative who’s a Virginia planter?”
That was Bartram’s story! I laughed, I doubled up with laughter, but
inwardly. “Just so,” I said. “I’ve been visiting, Mr. Pomeroy. It’s a
good thing to see the world and all that’s in it.”
“That’s a sailor’s opinion, sir,” he answered. “And you’ll doubtless
find things to interest you in Africa and the West Indies.”
He went on about his business, and David Scott, being tired of standing
and peering down through the gratings into the darkness of the empty
slave deck, moved aft and found a place where he could sit and think,
or not think but only stare at the sea that was growing more blue.
We are foreigners. I made the remark to myself that life was strange,
and many other men have made, are making, and will make the like
comment. For me, I was indolent and befogged and held in a Sargasso
Sea, like to that physical one somewhere in this ocean. I said to
myself that doubtless it would be difficult to leave the _Janet_
in Africa, but at the first English island I would surely do so.
And then came along Geordie with the morning dram for officer and
passenger, and he seemed to regard me as both.
I drank. The sea sparkled, the wind sang. I began to love the ship.
And was it so bad, this traffic that I had never particularly thought
of and certainly never questioned before I quitted Scotland--_on a
visit to a Virginia kinsman_? That ill gipsy Mirth, that I gave
house room to, screeched at that. But as the rum worked the wry-mouthed
started aside, and there came in General Benevolence, beaming on
the slave ship and Whidah and Calabar and Daga and Camaroons and the
other heathenish names. Then I grew judicial and thought I must wait
to judge--_wait till I got used to it_. And I never saw the imp
Self-Interest sitting on my shoulder, patting my head, his heel on my
heart.
The dram was not so deep but that in an hour Daniel Askew--Eboe
Sam--Old Mill quarter--returned upon me. But at dinner time there would
be another.
The good breeze held and drove the full-sailed ship joyously. It was
not hot or cold, but sunny and gay. And David Scott had no shackles
upon him, nor had to go into the tobacco field. He began to think of
his ambitions, and of how from, say, Jamaica, he might get to Holland,
and thence into France where were Jacobite Scots not a few. Some kind
of career--in a learned profession if he could manage that. He didn’t
want the army; not the Scots Company in the French army, not any army.
He did not like the life of an idle soldier, nor the life of a soldier
in action. He liked a book life and a life out with nature. He had,
after all, that much good out of Virginia. Memories of the morn and the
night, the sun and the air. Earth, water, air and fire, color, sound
and the trees.
Scotland--Virginia; Virginia--Scotland. The Hebrides brig--the _King
William_--the _Janet_--Christian Todd’s little boat and his
flute coming down the river! And what would one do in France without
money? Money, money, money, money. Rider without steed; sails without
wind!
A slender, dark man, very dark, with blue eyes, approached me. I saw
that this would be the surgeon, Colley, whom they had said at breakfast
would be out to-day. He came up. “It’s the Captain’s kinsman, Mr.
Scott, I believe?”
“The same,” I answered. “Sit down, won’t you? I am glad to see you
better.”
He took his seat beside me. “I got a nasty fever at Daga going in a
boat up the river after sunset. I gave myself all the bark in the
medicine locker, but it hung on. Up one day and down the next. But I’ve
been getting better for a fortnight and I’ll soon be all right. I feel
finely to-day.--How did you like Virginia?”
“Why, it’s got its good and its bad.”
“Mixed feelings?” he said. “That’s me. I regard most places with mixed
feelings.”
“The _Janet_?” I asked, then thought, “If I say things like that
forever, I shall be disloyal to William Bartram.”
He clasped his knee with long, bony, well-shaped hands--surgeons’ hands
with power and knowledge in them, and lifted those intense blue eyes
of his to the topgallants. “I went in debt to get through Surgeons’
Hall. When I was through, I could not get out of debt. Every other man
I saw seemed to be a surgeon running to a case! But I had none, or
so few that they could not get me out of debt. They seemed all to be
in debt themselves. Bread and cheese, even, grew to be a problem. At
length every creditor was threatening. So at last I said, ‘I will go
on a ship, for ships at least seem to be always wanting surgeons.’ So
I answered advertisements of East Indiamen and others, but always when
I got there each berth had just been filled. I was hungry and not far
from ragged. And there was one creditor who made himself detestable. So
I saw one morning that the Guineaman, _Janet_, wanted a surgeon.
Here I am.--The pay’s not bad, and your cousin’s a strong man and a
good captain. I would drown myself from most Guineamen I know, but I’ve
stayed on this. Three years. I’ve even paid the worst of the damned
creditors and mean to pay them all.”
“Shall you spend your life on a slaver?”
“No! No, indeed. Just two or three more years till I get clear. The
pay’s higher than elsewhere if you can stand the game.”
“Stand the game?”
“Africa’s a hot country,” he said, “with strange, old diseases. There’s
all the chances of the sea--and there’s Africa.”
“I never gave all this a thought till lately,” I said. “There are
worlds within worlds like Chinese boxes. I suppose it _is_ a sickly
trade for all concerned.”
“Grain Coast, Gold Coast, or Slave Coast; it is only a question of
degrees. If you’re merchant for inanimates--ivory, beeswax, palm oil,
dyewoods, Malaguetta pepper or what not--still there’s sickness. Of
course it’s worse in the _Janet’s_ trade.”
“Yes, of course.”
I looked toward the forecastle. “Yet he seems to have a healthy crew.”
“These are the seasoned and the new hands. We lost fifteen men voyage
before last.”
“And how many black men?”
“Eighty,” he answered. “There was a kind of pestilence. But all that’s
unusual. He’s got an extraordinary record for a clean ship and little
trouble.”
“‘Holy Bartram,’” I said, and then repented, for he had pulled me out
of the river and I was going along with him. Colley’s bright blue eyes
flashed my way. “He’s told you that? He’s proud of it; he keeps it like
a pot of balm on the shelf of his conscience.”
I broke into laughter. “Then we’ve all got a conscience! You, too?”
“I’ve got a surgeon’s conscience. I do my best.”
I said, “I was not visiting a Virginia planter. I was a Stuart man
at Culloden and was sold into slavery. I’ve got a personal, not a
hearsay, knowledge of what it is to be bound. How much balm for my
conscience should I have to have if I persisted upon this ship? At the
moment, of course, I have a pot upon my shelf. I did not know what was
the _Janet_ when I came aboard, and I cannot go knock down the man
at the wheel and alter her course.”
He turned with vivacity. “I knew McNaughton was holding something back!
So you’ve had a history too! Aren’t there a lot of them? And you’re to
be considered as just a bird of passage? I understood that you were to
have Philip Smith’s place. McNaughton said that the Captain had taken
a personal liking to you and that as he’s daft on family anyway, your
fortune might be considered to be made!”
I laughed again. “What fortune?”
His blue eyes half closed. “Oh, all things are relative! But of course
if you’ve got great ambitions----”
“I do not know how great they are,” I answered. “But greater than this.
I’ll go the first port I can.”
“That won’t be an African port,” he said.
I reminded him of the ships that traded only for ivory and palm oil and
gum copal and so forth. I might transship to one of them.
“It isn’t,” he answered, “the easiest thing in the world to do that!
They aren’t always in the same river mouth with us, nor are their times
our times. From Sierra Leone to Camaroons is a long, long way, Mr.
Scott. And you’ve got to go in parties in Africa. It’s not a place for
single souls to be trotting around! You’ll have to wait, I’m thinking,
for Jamaica. And maybe you’ll change your mind in Jamaica. Unless you
have influence with the Governor, or with some great sugar planter who
buys what the Royal African Company has to sell.”
I sat in silence, looking at the blue sea. Colley yawned and stretched
his thin limbs. “Africa gets into the blood and bone. It’s the climate
and the sea and, it sometimes seems to me, an old, strange rhyme and
routine. At first there’s a kind of horror in the life, but at last Use
comes in--though when you think of it there’s a kind of horror in Use
herself. But you grow indifferent. If there’s any tremendous wrong in
enslaving black barbarians it gets to be as invisible between Whidah or
Calabar and Kingston or Bridgetown or Charleston as it is everywhere
else in the world.”
Colonel Amory rose before me and how invisible it had been to him and
his easy and amiable like. How invisible it was to Judith Amory. How
invisible it was to Scotland, whose merchants and wandering sons were
everywhere. How invisible to England, with her ships upon the seas and
her “royal” companies.
Something out of old school reading entered with violence into my mind.
_The dyer’s hand subdued to that it works in._ I left my seat
and moving to the rail stared at sky and sea, then returned. “A little
more or a little less of misery--good ships and bad ships--I’m not
talking about that! It’s the whole damned business, root and branch,
white and black alike, that I’m meaning. Men enslaved and men enslaving
everywhere, and they’re twin brothers in wretchedness!”
He opened those intense blue eyes. “Oh,” he said, “if you’re a
Quaker----”
But I was nothing like so complete a man. I was an unhappy person with
an imp upon my shoulder that was going to strangle me.